Planning for the future

There is lots of finger pointing about who failed to timely identify and start planning for the worst case scenario for the corona virus disaster. And that won’t stop.

At this point, our elected officials and just about everyone else, should be anticipating that, at some point that is likely to be sooner rather than later, there will be a need for the State of Connecticut and its local governments to tally up the costs and pay the bills, and that this will result in major deficits and financial troubles. These officials should be avoiding a future finger-pointing exercise by starting now to deal with this known and inevitable future problem.

This is an egalitarian disaster affecting everyone, in additional to those diagnosed with the virus.

On the employment front of the war, from news reports it appears that virtually all of the employment layoffs without salary have involved Connecticut’s private sector. Public sector employment has apparently not been affected, except perhaps that many public sector employees, including teachers, are working remotely.

Discussions should be started now about implementing voluntary public sector salary freezes and rollbacks. The monies saved will be needed to pay the bills for the disaster.

Our elected officials and the public sector unions should be speaking out now about voluntary agreements to freeze wages and roll backs past pay increases. Yes, many public sector employees are first-responders who absolutely deserve our thanks and praise. But they should share in some of the financial burdens that so many people in Connecticut are suffering. After all, many of the front line private sector soldiers continue to slog on at low wages. The least the public sector (including our elected officials) should do is slog on at middle class wages without pay increases. And yes, the lowest paid public sector employees should be exempted from any such discussions.

Furthermore, if voluntary discussions don’t work, our elected officials should consider public sector collective bargaining legislation that provides that any union which does not agree to wage freezes and rollbacks, is prohibited from negotiating future wage increases for a long time, say 10 years.

And yes, though not a subject of this letter, Connecticut’s well-compensated private sector CEOs and other senior executives should also accept a voluntary wage freeze and roll back.

Lester Freundlich Stamford